Dearly Departed

by David Housewright

  “The county attorney?”

  “Licking his chops.”

  “And the sorry sonuvabitch named in the warrant?”

  McGaney smiled. “At his place of business.”

  Anne grinned, too—grinned like she’d just learned her own daughter had been named class valedictorian. She took a small school bell from her desk drawer and rang it vigorously. “Ticket to ride, boys! We have a ticket to ride!” she shouted across the room. The detectives, smiling just as incandescently, literally hopped up from behind their partitions and started holstering guns, fastening bulletproof Kevlar vests, and donning dark-blue windbreakers with the word POLICE spelled out in huge white letters on the back. Conversations grew louder, jokes flew; it was like a party had suddenly broken out. This was why most of the detectives had come to this line of work—to get the bad guys— and they were loving it.

  Anne told one of the detectives to arrange for uniform backup.

  “Backup? We don’t need no stinking backup,” another replied in an accent that was supposed to be Hispanic, paraphrasing a line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

  They headed for the door en masse, Anne leading the way.

  I hadn’t felt so excluded since my friends won the softball league championship the season after I retired from the team.

  Cynthia Grey always greeted me the same way, like an old friend she hadn’t seen since the last high-school reunion. This time she gave me a warm hug and happy smile in her office suite, located in a former cloister not far from the St. Paul PD. Her office manager didn’t approve—not of the hug and certainly not of me. Once again I had arrived without an appointment, distracting Cynthia from the task at hand, which was the practice of law.

  Cynthia was known in the Twin Cities for her stalwart defense of DWI suspects, and her quotes were often sought by the local media. Like MADD, she wanted them off the street. But unlike those militant enemies of drunk drivers everywhere, she wanted the lawbreakers in treatment, not in jail. However, it was a stunning victory in a single civil suit that had recently thrust her into the public eye.

  She had filed a complaint against a women’s clothing manufacturer on behalf of a dozen female employees, alleging that the company’s TV and print ads—which always depicted women in a sexual context—fostered an environment inside the company that condoned, if not encouraged, sexual harassment. Stories about the suit appeared in several local and national publications, usually accompanied by a photograph of the women and their lawyer. You could always tell which woman was Cynthia. She was the beautiful one in back who wasn’t smiling.

  Anyway, the clothing manufacturer settled. No one knows for how much because the settlement was sealed. But it was big time. You could tell by the quality of the cars the plaintiffs went out and bought immediately afterward. Cynthia bought a car, too. And gave it to me. True, it was only a 1991 Dodge Colt—it was all I would accept—but, still, when was the last time your girlfriend bought you a car?

  Which brings me back to Miss Efficiency, aka Desirée Smith, the office manager. The phone had been ringing nonstop since the settlement, and without her, Cynthia wouldn’t have time for all that media schmoozing. Without her, Cynthia probably would be late for most of her court appearances and client meetings, few of her motions would be filed on time, and her highly organized brigade of freelance attorneys and legal assistants would become a confused rabble. Chaos would reign, and the firm would fall. At least, that’s how Miss Efficiency sees it. And whenever I come along, well, there goes the schedule.

  Cynthia led me by the hand into her inner sanctum, away from the office manager’s disapproving gaze, and cleared an empty space for me on her file-cluttered leather sofa. She sat in a matching chair across from me.

  Cynthia was wearing a black two-piece suit. The jacket was double-breasted with a shawl collar, the skirt was tight without being too tight and came to the top of her knees, and her blouse was white silk. Lately, that was all she wore. Black and white. I asked her about it once, and she said she was establishing a “definitive image all her own.” More likely it was the definitive image of the consultant at the store where Cynthia bought most of her clothes. Not that I’m complaining. She looks stunning in black and white, with shoulder-length brown hair and matching eyes, with long, shapely legs. I’ve only known two women with more attractive legs. The first was my wife, who was killed along with our daughter nearly five years ago by a drunk driver who Cynthia, in fact, later defended. The second was a twenty-two-year-old murderer I fingered for the Minneapolis cops. She was killed while resisting arrest.

  “So, are you working?” Cynthia asked.

  It was an honest question. I’m a one-man band, and I usually take on only one case at a time, so I often suffer through periods of unemployment. Occasionally, when those droughts linger long enough to cause me financial distress, I’ll obtain lists of unclaimed property from various government agencies and then locate the missing owners for a percentage of the property’s value. Sometimes—when money is real tight—I’ll do bounty work for a Minneapolis bail bondsman I know. Still, I can’t kick. Last year—my best year yet—I worked one hundred and sixty-nine days and took home nearly thirty-six K after taxes, insurance, health care, and expenses. That might not sound like much. But when you live alone (without house or car payments) like I do, it’s plenty.

  “As a matter of fact I am working,” I told Cynthia. “I’m trying to learn what happened to a woman who disappeared last October.”

  “I thought you didn’t do runaways.”

  “This is a little different. The smart money bets the woman was murdered, but the police can’t find a body or evidence of foul play. I was hired to come up with an explanation that the woman’s attorney can live with.”

  “Who’s the lawyer?”

  “Ahh, well …” I stammered.

  “Not Monica Adler?” Monica was Cynthia’s most hated rival.

  “No, no, no,” I assured her. “I haven’t seen Monica since— well, quite awhile. Why would I talk to her?”

  “Good question.”

  “No, it’s not her.”

  “Who, then?”

  “He came to my office—”

  “Who?”

  “Hunter Truman.”

  “That piece of shit?”

  “You’ve met?” I asked.

  “Bastard works the court like a fucking whore; that’s how he peels his banana.”

  “Do you eat with that mouth?”

  Cynthia flushed a deep crimson and not just from embarrassment. I am always amused when Cynthia’s carefully constructed facade of upper-class gentility slips and the street kid peeks over the top, but she certainly is not. She works hard—and pays a great deal of money—to make sure the facade never slips.

  “I am surprised that you would deign to accept employment from that gentleman,” she said, her voice calm and well modulated.

  “A buck’s a buck.”

  “If you are financially embarrassed, I could lend—”

  “Oh, stop it,” I told her. “It’s a job like any other job, maybe a little more interesting than most.”

  “But Hunter Truman?!” Cynthia asked, making the name sound like a disease usually treated with penicillin.

  “He’s no worse than most of the lawyers I’ve worked for.”

  “It hurts me to hear you say that.”

  I have to admit it gave me a twinge, too, defending him.

  “Will you forgive me if I buy lunch?” I asked.

  “I’ll buy lunch,” Cynthia replied. “I don’t want to be eating on that … gentleman’s money.” She opened her office door and announced, “Taylor and I are going to lunch.”

  “You’re lunching with Judge Kennelly,” Miss Efficiency corrected her.

  “I am?”

  “Twelve-thirty at Gallivan’s. You need to leave in ten minutes.”

  Cynthia closed the door again. “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “A
ctually, I came over to invite you to the Twins game tonight. They’re playing the hated Cleveland Indians.”

  “I have a meeting tonight.”

  “Who with?”

  “My ETOS Club.”

  “ETOS?”

  “It’s a club several women and I started in law school. Once a month we get together and discuss the various sides of social issues. Exploring the Other Side, get it?”

  “Yeah, I do. What kind of social issues?”

  “Tonight we’re discussing why men embrace sports so dearly.”

  “That’s a social issue?”

  “Why do men like sports? Give me an argument,” Cynthia said.

  “It’s a better excuse for getting together than forming a lame club.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. Where are you holding this meeting?”

  “Don’t get angry.”

  “Why would I get angry?”

  “One of the members arranged for a private suite at the Metrodome, along the third-base line.”

  “You’re watching the ball game? From a private suite? With booze and food and instant replay on TV monitors?”

  She grinned. “Want me to bring you a souvenir?”

  three

  The snow had killed them. Twenty-three inches of it. It had kept the heads of witnesses low and their eyes down. It had clouded windshields, giving drivers a colorless, out-of-focus view of the world. It had buried footprints and tire treads and any hope of deploying dogs. One investigator had suggested that Alison Donnerbauer Emerton could be facedown in her own backyard, and they wouldn’t have known it until spring. But when spring finally came, Alison was not in her backyard. She wasn’t in the grove behind her house. She wasn’t in the fields bordering the street that lead to the cul-de-sac. She wasn’t anywhere that the Dakota County Sheriff’s Department could think to look.

  All this was duly noted in Anne Scalasi’s file. Hunter Truman was right; there wasn’t much there. But the sheriff had obviously held back information from Truman—and the news media. As Edmond Locard, the great criminologist once said, “Every contact leaves a trace. The criminal must, of necessity, leave behind something at the scene of the crime.” And this time what the criminal had left behind was a single surface footprint on the flat rubber mat just inside Alison’s front door.

  Anne’s file contained a four-by-five photograph of the print. Forensics identified it as the design of an LA Gear Air System running shoe, left foot, size ten, men’s. No wear could be detected on the tread, leading the detectives to conclude that it was new or little used. There was no depth to the impression and no second print, so the height and weight of the suspect couldn’t be determined. However, Raymond Fleck wore size ten, and while no running shoes could be found among his possessions, that fact had excited the detectives to no end.

  One piece of evidence that had been released to the news media was the small amount of blood discovered on the carpet just inside Alison’s front door and the few drops found on the doorframe. Citing the shape of the drops and the laws of flow dynamics, forensics concluded that the victim was standing just inside the door when she was struck hard enough to cause instantaneous bleeding and that the force of the blow splashed the frame and carpet. The blood was Type A Positive. Same as Alison’s. And it had been there less than twenty-four hours. It supported Anne’s theory about a shove in. Other than that …

  Officers had searched every room in the house three times, using spirals and zones and strip patterns, and came up empty. No hair samples that did not belong to Alison or her husband. No fibers that weren’t accounted for. No unexplained dirt or stains. There were plenty of unidentified fingerprints, but most were in high-traffic areas where you would expect them: the kitchen, the living room. There were none on the door or the doorframe. And none that matched Raymond Fleck’s.

  The detectives who searched Alison’s purse had found the note. The single word, SOON was printed with an ordinary crayon on common white typing paper and placed in a standard number-ten envelope; the examiners at the BCA laughed when they were asked for a handwriting analysis. The detectives had also found Alison’s gun. It hadn’t been fired. The detectives traced it to a sporting goods store in Bloomington. An employee there remembered Alison.

  “She wanted a .357. Everyone wants a cannon these days,” the employee recalled. “They see the cowboys usin’ ’em on TV, so they figure they gotta have one. Only I knew she couldn’t handle it, so I convinced her to go with the smaller caliber, go with the .22 Iver Johnson. She was disappointed, and I thought I might lose the sale until I explained that you hit a guy with a .22 and you’re going to stop him, no doubt about it, but you probably won’t kill him unless you take out a vital organ. She thought that was good.”

  There was nothing else in her purse that should not have been there. Each item was carefully logged. Truman had been correct; Alison’s ID, cash, ATM card, credit cards, and checkbook were all intact.

  And that was it. The photographer had taken his photographs, the sketcher had made his sketches, the measurer had taken his measurements, the evidence man had tagged and preserved his evidence, and the master notetaker had written down in shorthand the observations and descriptions offered by all the others. It all added up to zero. This lack of clues didn’t surprise me. In a murder, it’s the victim who supplies the most information—and our victim was not to be found.

  As for witnesses: The bulk of Anne’s file consisted of verbatim statements made by 137 people who had been interviewed in the course of the investigation, many of them more than once. Some of the reports were badly written and incomplete. Others were paragons of clarity and brevity. I read them all, listing the names and addresses of a dozen or so witnesses who had the most to say about the case in my own notebook. I would interview these myself.

  I was sitting at my dining room table, the pages of the file freed from the fastener and organized in front of me. Ogilvy, my gray-and-white French lop-eared rabbit, lounged at my feet, munching day-old popcorn.

  A photograph was included in the file, an eight-by-ten color glossy of two women dressed in period costumes. Turn-of-the-century European, I guessed. The woman in the background, dark hair, dark visage, seemed formidable but confused—anger without focus. Her hand rested on the shoulder of a younger woman in the foreground. The younger woman was Alison.

  I set the photograph aside yet found myself returning to it several times while I read the file, picking it up and studying it and tossing it down again only to reach for it a few minutes later. This was a different Alison than the woman in the black-and-white photograph. This Alison was no mysterious femme fatale, a seductress framed in shadow. This Alison was soft and vulnerable and desperate. You could feel her throat tightening around some great, indescribable pain. And her eyes, her spectacular blue-green eyes, were almost too painful to contemplate, yet I kept looking into them, couldn’t stop looking into them.

  One of the women who’d been interviewed was an actress named Marie Audette. She had been close to Alison when they both toiled for the University of Minnesota theater company. I guessed that the photo was taken in connection with a student performance. I set it next to the black and white Truman had given me. Identical faces, yet it was hard to believe it was the same woman. One so confident. The other so fearful. I wondered which had been taken first.

  I was debating whether to sift through the entire file a third time when the telephone rang. The Twins and Indians were on the radio, Hall of Fame broadcaster Herb Carneal doing the play-by-play, and I turned down the volume before answering the phone.

  “Have it solved, yet?” Anne Scalasi asked.

  “The butler did it with a candlestick in the library.”

  “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”

  “How’d the roundup go?”

  “No muss, no fuss,” Anne replied. “McGaney’s pissed, though. The killer gave up without a struggle.”

  “So you had to take him alive, h
uh? Bummer.”

  “You believe it? He kept the gun! You never keep the gun. Any idiot who ever watched an episode of Perry Mason knows you never keep the gun.”

  “The declining grade of criminal we get these days, Annie; I fear for the future of the Republic. Did you speak with Teeters?”

  “I did. He agreed to let you in.”

  “Great.”

  “Desperate men will do desperate things. He’ll meet you at eight tomorrow morning at the scene; he doesn’t want you seen hanging around the station. Only, keep it quiet. Teeters has taken a beating over this case. The last thing he needs is for the media to get involved again. Especially your friend Beamon at the Minneapolis paper.”

  “Beamon is no friend of mine.”

  “Then why does he keep asking about you every time I see him? He asked about you again this afternoon when we brought in the killer.”

  “He thinks we’re having an affair.”

  “Set him straight, will you?”

  “I have. But the more I tell him we’re just good friends, the less he believes it. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “You could marry Cynthia.”

  “There’s a thought.”

  The other end of the phone went dead silent, and for a moment I thought we had been cut off.

  “Annie?”

  “I was joking,” she said.

  “So was I,” I told her.

  “I’m going home to bed. It’s late.”

  “Thanks, Annie,” I told her.

  “One thing, Taylor,” she said. “If you learn anything, anything at all …”

  “I’ll tell Teeters first and then you.”

  “Good night, Taylor.”

  “Good night, sleep tight, and don’t let the pom-poms bite.”

  “Pom-poms?”

  “Just something my daughter used to say.”

  four

  Alison Donnerbauer Emerton had been a loner and not always by choice. It wasn’t that she’d lacked charm or social grace; many of the 137 witnesses the Dakota County cops had interviewed testified that she’d had plenty of both. Her problem was IQ. She was tested at 172, 32 points above genius. She graduated high school at sixteen, earned her bachelor’s at eighteen and her master’s at nineteen. She was younger, smarter, and more attractive than most of her peers. What other reasons did people need to resent her?